


born in a snowstorm

by fleurmatisse



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Gen, Good Parents Maggie & Wentworth Tozier, Trans Richie Tozier, mentions of transphobia, unintentional misgendering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:40:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23393416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleurmatisse/pseuds/fleurmatisse
Summary: Maggie was right that Rachel would be unexpected. She was wrong about the name Rachel.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 78





	born in a snowstorm

**Author's Note:**

> a warning that for most of this fic maggie refers to richie as a girl but that’s bc richie’s never directly told her otherwise. she gets there in the end.

Rachel Tozier was born during a snowstorm. Maggie could say something about the trip to the hospital, during which Went could barely go over twenty miles an hour, being a sign of difficulties to come, seeing as it was the beginning of March and Derry rarely got snow past the end of January; instead, she thinks of it as a sign that Rachel would be something unexpected. Unique, and impossible to ignore. Maggie was right about that. She’s not right about the name Rachel. 

The first sign, Maggie will recognize later, is when Rachel is four, and she barricades herself in her bedroom (impressively well for a four year old), refusing to come out so they can go to church. Maggie hovers as Went talks to her through the crack in the door, because Went seems to get their daughter’s logic in a way Maggie doesn’t. (Some days, Maggie can’t help feeling a little resentful that it seems to come to him so easily.)

Finally, Went gets Rachel to open the door all the way, with a promise from both of them that they won’t get mad. Maggie gasps at the shreds of fabric on the carpet that once made up a dress, and then she notices that Rachel has cut her hand with the scissors she must have taken from the kitchen to destroy said dress, and she’s more concerned with that than any clothes. 

When Rachel is five, she comes home from school and tells Maggie about her new friend Stuttering Bill, who is, according to Rachel, The Best. Stuttering Bill becomes just Bill and then Big Bill, and one day Rachel says, “Bill has a little brother named Georgie but he was almost called Grace if he was a girl and Bill would’ve been Mary but that doesn’t fit him at all so it’s a good thing he’s a boy I guess because I don’t think I’d be friends with someone named Mary and what would I be if I was a boy?”

Maggie takes a second to process Rachel’s little speech as she slices an apple for her. Rachel is unusually quiet, looking up at Maggie with serious eyes that are still squinting a little—Maggie will have to talk to Went about getting her eyes checked again. 

“Well,” Maggie says, handing her an apple slice, “if you were a boy, we would have called you Richard.”

Rachel eats the apple slice, still quiet, and then she says, “I’d hate to be called Richard.”

Maggie smiles and is about to say something like  _ Good thing we named you Rachel, then _ . 

But first Rachel says, “I would definitely want to be called Richie. That’s almost like Rachel, right?”

“I suppose,” Maggie says, amused. Rachel nods, a thoughtful look on her face, and takes the plate full of apple with a smile and a rushed  _ thank you _ before she runs out of the room. 

The first time Bill comes over to play, he calls Rachel Richie and roughhouses with her like she’s just another boy. That’s Maggie’s second sign. It takes her an embarrassingly long time to put it together. 

When she’s ten, Rachel asks if Maggie likes being called Mom, and Maggie admits that she doesn’t, really, because it makes her feel old. Over the next few weeks, Maggie notices a pattern: if she calls Rachel by her name, Rachel will call her Mom, or worse, Mother. If she calls her Richie, Rachel calls her Maggie or Mags and sometimes even Margaret. Went finds this highly amusing, as he’s been calling her Richie since the nickname began, and Rachel calls him Wentworth with a peculiar and implacable accent that only serves to amuse Went more. So Maggie calls her Richie more often, until it’s just the way she thinks of her, even though her friends tell her she shouldn’t bend to  _ Rachel’s _ will like that—and she definitely shouldn’t let  _ Rachel  _ call her Maggie. Maggie laughs it off, but she finds herself spending less time with them and more time with Sharon Denbrough, who, Richie yells during a meltdown one day when Maggie slips, never calls her Rachel, and if she can do it, why can’t Maggie?

Richie likes to make a lot of jokes, and Maggie isn’t sure what to make of half of them (the other half she will chide Richie for being inappropriate or cursing, even though later she’ll laugh as she recounts it to Went). Richie’s impressions—as terrible as they are—tend to be men. She pitches her voice low and saunters around like the hero of an old time movie and says things like  _ us boys _ when talking about her friends. Maggie thinks it will change when, along with the now-familiar troupe of Bill-Eddie-Stan, Richie brings home a girl named Beverly. Richie will grow into being feminine and out of her tomboyish ways. Beverly is a tomboy, too, but she’s different than Richie. Maggie watches them out in the yard sometimes and thinks that Beverly is the only girl among them and then she cautiously thinks,  _ my son, Richie _ , and it’s not as strange as she thought it would be. Scary, certainly, but not strange. 

Richie never brings it up, but Maggie continues to think  _ my son _ , my boy, and the day that she finally says it aloud, when Richie is nearly fourteen, he looks at her like she’s done something unbelievable and cries in front of her for the first time since he was eleven. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, reaching out to hold him, thinking she was wrong, but he shakes his head against her shoulder and says, “Thank you.”

One day not long after she’s confirmed that Richie is her son, when Richie’s friends (including two more recent additions of Ben and Mike) come over to collect him for one of their mysterious outings, Bill finds Maggie in the den and hands her a book and then runs out before she can ask him about it. The book is about people like Richie, and she cries when she thinks about Bill bringing it to her, wanting her to understand Richie better, so thankful that her son has a friend like him, like all of them.

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this months ago and never posted it but i have decided i do want to put my positive spin on maggie learning richie is trans out into the world actually and a little self doubt won’t stop me


End file.
